Earlier this week, The Witcher devs confirmed what was previously only suspected – the mysterious medallion half hidden and buried in the snow in CD Projekt Red’s recent Witcher announcement is indeed that of a Lynx.
However, before this confirmation, the School of the Lynx only ever existed in fan fiction. But it would now appear that CDPR was inspired by its Witcher community, and as a result is building this new school into its video game series.
So, we have an idea of how CDPR came up with its version of School of the Lynx, but what about the fan fiction project’s creators themselves?
Chatting to Eurogamer, School of the Lynx author SMiki55 gave more insight on how they came up with the story behind their piece of Witcher lore.
“The roots were planted by Witcher190, who found the medallion fanart and created a ‘School of the Lynx’ page that basically said, ‘this article is free for anyone to edit’. The medallion looked cool, and it somehow urged me to invent a story for it,” SMiki55 says.
“Lynx, of course, is a cat species, and we know from official sources that School of the Cat’s seat was taken by unspecified soldiers.
“Lambert and Keira entered the picture because I’m a fan of their shipping and wanted to give them some stuff to do after their happy ending variant of The Witcher 3. So, I weaved a story about how Lambert, Keira, Gaetan, Joel, and Adela (a character from The Hexer TV series, later replaced by Witcher190 with Dragonfly from TRPG) teamed up to recover the Cat caravan from Nilfgaardian soldiers with bravado and luck.
“Witcher190 then came up with further details and continued the story with the tournament and so on. Some ideas were discussed together via private messages.”
SMiki55 was keen to stress they didn’t think that CDPR was adapting their fan fiction, however.
“We [the fanfiction writers] don’t claim to own terms like ‘School of the [insert animal here]’ and anyone is in full freedom to make their own Witcher school without taking our ideas into consideration – including CD Projekt,” SMiki55 states.
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For those yet to read SMiki55 and Witcher190’s work, below is a small extract from the School of the Lynx fan page:
“The school as such, arose after a brief chat between the other members of the Cat School, Lambert and Keira Metz, who after a chance meeting, decided to join forces to recover the caravan. Lambert’s motivations were clear, to honour his friend Aiden and to have his legacy somehow continue.